Monday, February 9th, 2015
Dixie State University's Fine Arts Department will host more than 1,100 collegiate theater artists, faculty members and industry professionals from across the west for the 47th-Annual Kennedy Center College Theatre Region VIII Festival (KCACTF) this Wednesday-through-Saturday, February 11-14, at the Eccles Fine Arts Center and other campus facilities.
The four-day festival will feature the best collegiate designers, technicians and performers from colleges and universities in Utah, Arizona, Nevada, California, Hawai'i and Guam. DSU also served as host of the 42nd-annual KCACTF regional festival back in 2010.
The KCACTF Region VIII Festival will feature several fully-staged theater productions held in the Eccles Fine Arts Center and the Avenna Center Cox Auditorium. Additionally, there will be daily scholarship competitions in acting, directing, playwriting and stage management.
Students will also be able to take part in a number of workshops and exhibitions dealing with stage and lighting design, audition techniques, stage combat, theatre critique, costume and makeup design, choreography and physical improvisation, which will held in various DSU campus locations.
Each year the KCACTF Region VIII Festival brings students and faculty together to see one another's work and to share ideas. In addition to performances, there are a wide range of activities that in the past have included workshops and seminars on such topics as playwriting, auditioning, voice, movement, stage combat, theater for children, scene painting, scenery construction, and so on. There are sessions for beginning theater artist and the experienced faculty member.
Students, faculty, and staff who bring productions to regional festivals are encouraged to attend the entire festival. All festival participants are urged to attend productions brought by their peers, participate as audience or auditioners in the Irene Ryan Acting Scholarship program, and to avail themselves of the full range of workshops, symposia, and exhibits that are part of each regional festival.
Started in 1969 by Roger L. Stevens, the Kennedy Center's founding chairman, KCACTF (http://www.kennedy-center.org/education/actf) is a national theater program involving 18,000 students from colleges and universities nationwide that has served as a catalyst in improving the quality of college theater in the United States. The KCACTF has grown into a network of more than 600 academic institutions throughout the country, where theater departments and student artists showcase their work and receive outside assessment by KCACTF judges.
The 2015 national festival will take place in Washington, D.C., April 13-18. Selected regional productions and performers will be invited to take part at the national festival.
For more information on this year's KCACTF Region VIII Festival, contact DSU Theatre Department Chair Mark Houser at 435-879-4384, or visit www.kcactf-8.org, for a full schedule of festival events.
